Anyone read this on scifi in the NYTimes? I was...irked.

He seems absolutely clueless about what he's been reading. It's just occurring now to him that science fiction often has wooden characters in support of a plot only a geek could love? It's hard to take him at all seriously when he includes Cats Cradle among his 10 best list, and calls it:

The perfect, Platonic balance of science and fiction, one that still finds room for merciless satire and a moral that resonates to the present day: that self-destruction is mankind's one true calling.

I love that book, but it has barely a passing acquaintance with science.

Yeah, everyone knows that no current science fiction writers give a damn about character or emotion. t rolls eyes forever

No, those books are called "Literary fiction" now.

Yeah, everyone knows that no current science fiction writers give a damn about character or emotion.

No kidding. He seems like the perfect person to talk about scifi, since he loves it SO MUCH. Or not. Yeesh. I mean, it's one thing to be bitchy about a specific book, but to sweepingly say the whole genre sucks, in your first column (at least I"m assuming first--the front page is all "New SciFi column!")? Um. Way to piss off the people who would be reading you.

yep, I'll go with annoying

to sweepingly say the whole genre sucks, in your first column

I don't see where he says that. Or what he does say that isn't true.

OK, sorry--sweepingly say that the entire genre *currently* sucks.

"I cannot do this in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual."

And while I agree there's a lot of dreck, there's a lot of dreck in EVERY genre. And it doesn't really seem to be the way to introduce a new column. Especially given that while getting people to read a scifi book they might otherwise not read is a great goal...a lot of the people reading your column are going to be people who currently enjoy scifi. So saying it almost all sucks really isn't a great foot to start off on, it seems.

This:

if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual

Is either not true, or no more true about sci fi than about any other genre, and there seems a subtext to me that he's talking about what makes sci fi different from other genres.

But he's not saying most of it is bad. He's saying most of it will not appeal to the average non-SF reader. The thrust of the article is: this is a good book. However, I can't recommend it to people who don't normally read SF, not because the story isn't interesting, but because

What is missing from "Counting Heads" that Marusek's earlier stories had in abundance is what you humans call emotion — a reason to care about his characters, so that observations like the preceding one would carry the impact they deserve.

Instead of focusing on the characters, the author's busy with world-building. That's why he's comparing it to stereo instructions, and that's what he's saying is typical of SF. Most of fiction is bad, yes. But I don't think you can say "most fiction, good and bad, has this same flaw." Whereas it is extremely common even in good SF.